BCIT Student Presentations to the BCLS Lower Mainland Group (January 31, 2020) By Robert Allen, BCLS (Life Member), CLS (Ret)
E
ach year at the January meeting of the BCLS Lower Mainland Group (LMG), four or five students are invited to present the projects they are working on. This year there were five presentations and all were very interesting and completely different from each other. LMG President Evgeny Petushkov chaired the meeting and invited the five students up to make their presentation. The room was darkened so most of the photographs taken during the presentations appear a bit dark. First up was Kyle Johnson who gave a presentation on using a drone and camera to fly over oil and gas pipelines to check for leaks in the lines. If there were any leaks, there would be discolouration in the vegetation along the right of way. This method has the distinct advantage of not destroying the habitat in ecologically sensitive areas and allowing for a fast method of checking over larger parts of the pipeline. Kyle gave an example of his work/project in the area near Fort St. John and showed how well it can work. Next up was Chris Oaks who described a project he did to assess the use of a terrestrial laser scanner for building strata surveys. Some building strata surveys can be very complex and Chris’ use of laser scanning took a lot of the guess work and fear of the unknown out of the work and produced surprisingly accurate results (to me at least - you must remember
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LMG President Evgeny Petushkov
Kyle outlining the equipment and software he used.
that I am a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to this type of technology). Third to present was Meghan McLellan who gave a presentation on the interesting use of a GIS system for indoor navigation. Meghan volunteers at BC Children’s Hospital and during
the course of her work there, thought that there must be a better way for the general public to find their way through the maze of floors and wings of the Hospital. She developed a GIS system based on the floor plans of the building and what each room is used for. She also went through many, many questions that had been previously asked by the general public of the volunteers at the information booths. All of that information was incorporated into the system and it now makes it much easier for the information booth volunteers to point people in the right direction. This same type of system could be used in other hospitals or large shopping centres.
